INTRODUCTION
This article describes how to customize the Alphabet Bar that is displayed at the bottom of the CRM Application Grids for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.
Starting with the Update Rollup 15 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, the Alphabet Bar can be customized. At the organizational level, this means that the same customized Alphabet Bar will be presented when users access the Microsoft Dynamics CRM organization.
More Information
To customize the Alphabet Bar, follow these steps:
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Extract and then configure the Microsoft.Crm.SE.OrgDBOrgSettingsTool.exe.
For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:2479288 A new tool that retrieves and changes the Organization level settings in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 configurations is available
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The tool lets you either retrieve all customizable settings for a particular CRM organization or change those settings by supplying the name of the setting that must be changed and its new value. The setting that controls the customization of the Alphabet Bar is called "JumpBarAlphabetOverride."
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To run the tool, open a command prompt in the folder where the tool and the associated files are stored, and then run the following command:
Microsoft.CRM.SE.OrgDBOrgSettingsTool.exe Update MyOrganization JumpBarAlphabetOverride "NewAlphabetBarDefinition"
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To reset the Alphabet Bar to its default definition, run the same command, but pass an empty string as the definition:
Microsoft.CRM.SE.OrgDBOrgSettingsTool.exe Update MyOrganization JumpBarAlphabetOverride ""
The Alphabet Bar definition
The Alphabet Bar definition has the form of a comma-separated list of the label and of the values to search for when the label is clicked. The default definition for the U.S. English CRM version is as follows:
(#:0|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9),(A:a),(B:b),(C:c),(D:d),(E:e),(F:f),(G:g),(H:h),(I:i),(J:j),(K:k),(L:l),(M:m),(N:n),(O:o),(P:p),(Q:q),(R:r),(S:s),(T:t),(U:u),(V:v),(W:w),(X:x),(Y:y),(Z:z)
Note There cannot be any spaces between the character sets.
Example 1
To have the label character displayed as "A" return results for multiple versions of "a," you could replace (A:a) in this string with (A:a|ä|á|æ|ã). Each character after the colon (:) that is separated by a pipe character (|) will be searched on for the jump condition.
To update the organization settings, you would then have to run the tool by using the following command:
Microsoft.CRM.SE.OrgDBOrgSettingsTool.exe Update MyOrganization JumpBarAlphabetOverride "(#:0|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9),(A:a|ä|á|æ|ã),(B:b),(C:c),(D:d),(E:e),(F:f),(G:g),(H:h),(I:i),(J:j),(K:k),(L:l),(M:m),(N:n),(O:o),(P:p),(Q:q),(R:r),(S:s),(T:t),(U:u),(V:v),(W:w),(X:x),(Y:y),(Z:z)"
Example 2
You can also extend the list of labels and of pairs of values if you have multiple jump points for each letter. Therefore, in addition to the label character that is displayed as "A," you can have a range of additional label-search value pairs that cover just a subset of the "A" range.
To achieve this, you could replace (A:a) with (A:a),(Aa-Am:aa|ab|ac|ad|ae|af|ag|ah|ai|aj|al|am),(An-Az:an|ao|ap|aq|ar|as|at|au|av|ax|ay|az) in the Alphabet Bar definition. In this manner, you can filter from all the items that corresponds to "A" only the items in the "Aa-Am" range or only the items in the "An-Az" range. You would run the tool by using the following command:
Microsoft.CRM.SE.OrgDBOrgSettingsTool.exe Update MyOrganization JumpBarAlphabetOverride "(#:0|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9),(A:a),(Aa-Am:aa|ab|ac|ad|ae|af|ag|ah|ai|aj|al|am),(An-Az:an|ao|ap|aq|ar|as|at|au|av|ax|ay|az),(B:b),(C:c),(D:d),(E:e),(F:f),(G:g),(H:h),(I:i),(J:j),(K:k),(L:l),(M:m),(N:n),(O:o),(P:p),(Q:q),(R:r),(S:s),(T:t),(U:u),(V:v),(W:w),(X:x),(Y:y),(Z:z)"
